1. Field of the Invention
This invention is in the field of door levers for security doors and particularly for door levers for doors of residential rooms in mental institutions where patients reside.
2. Prior Art
This invention relates to a serious problem where certain patients in behavioral health care facilities or psychiatric institutions try to commit suicide by hanging themselves with a cord or other ligature form looped over the top of a door and secured to a handle or knob of the door to the patient's room. This invention relates to methods and apparatus seeking to prevent such attempted suicides. Reasons for such behavior are complex and not the subject of the present invention; however, significant numbers of attempts do occur, and significant numbers of patients are committed into these institutions for the very reason that they are known to be candidates for suicide attempts. These institutions are supposed to be environments for treatment of these and other problems and for prevention of patients from achieving suicide.
While the methods employed for the attempted suicides vary with the available environment and creativity of the patients, the present invention is concerned with attempts by hanging with a cord, belt or other item with the near or proximal portion of the cord wrapped around the door knob, lever or other handle of a door. The cord is then draped over the top of the door and the distal or remote end of the cord, belt, twisted bed sheet or other item on the interior side of the door is formed into the suicidal noose.
In typical psychiatric institutions the patients' activities, as regards personal safety and behavior in general, are monitored carefully by staff; however, it is also common for patients to have private rooms with unlocked doors for them to come and go generally as they please. It is in these kinds of situations where a patient has periods of relative privacy and domain over his or her door, when a suicide attempt can be made without immediate awareness of institution staff and with enough time for the suicide to be successful before staff action can be taken. For various reasons there are surprisingly high numbers of attempted and successful suicides in psychiatric institutions that are not generally publicized or known, but administrators of these institutions are quite aware and concerned. The present invention addresses these tragedies and presents a practical apparatus believed to be able to significantly reduce the problem on a nationwide basis.
Attempts have been made to prevent or defeat the above-described efforts at suicide by hanging, by designing the doorknob such that any cord will not securely engage or connect to the doorknob, and thus will slide off and the opposite end of the cord cannot support any body weight and suicide will be defeated.
Conventional door levers comprise an elongated handle which pivots about an axis near one end of the lever. With such a design it is obviously quite easy to loop the remote end of a cord around the shaft of the lever and around the elongated lever itself. One proposed solution, such as seen in applicant's own pending non-provisional application Ser. No. 12/590,135 incorporated herein by reference, includes a partially conical form of the lever in the area of the pivot and a downward tapered shape of the handle portion of the lever. This design has been partially successful to reduce success in suicide attempts where a ligature is draped over the top of a door and extends down to the lever. However, there remain some situations where the ligature can become wedged in the area of the pivot or shaft connection at the base of the handle, namely wedged between the bottom surface of the handle and the surface of the door.
The present invention provides a totally new design of door lever which will prevent the latest nuance of possible wedging a ligature in the door handle assembly.